What If It All Goes Right?

Today I did an easy recovery ride, to work the soreness out of my body from yesterday's long, HOT 60-miler. Anyone who knows me well, however, knows that it's difficult for me to just enjoy a slow ride to nowhere, even if it has a specific training purpose. So I used the time and relatively slow speed to work on things that I never practice: bike handling skills, evasive maneuvers, cornering techniques, inducing spinouts to see if I could recover. In other words: training for When Something Goes Wrong.

It got me to thinking. We spend an extraordinary amount of time in our lives preparing for When Something Goes Wrong. We save for a rainy day. We stock up on canned goods, bottled water, and batteries. We keep up our professional network. We wait for the other shoe to drop. And yet for all our preparation, sometimes things go wrong despite our best efforts. Some things, like Elyse's cancer, happen regardless of how prepared we are for When Something Goes Wrong.

It seems strange that we spend all of our time obsessing about what to do When Something Goes Wrong and don't spend nearly as much time preparing for When Something Goes Right. We don't dare to imagine what our lives will be like then, When Something Goes Right. We don't prepare ourselves for our own successes, and for the lives that success brings us.

This bike trip is no exception. I have spent time training and preparing my body in case Something Goes Wrong and no time preparing for When Something Goes Right. I need to ask the questions: Am I prepared to embrace the life-changing experience of cycling across the country? After I've successfully done something few others have dared, am I prepared to delete the words "I can't" from my vocabulary? Permanently? Am I prepared to move on with my life as it was before, knowing that with a little more effort I can change the world? Scary questions. Scarier answers. Guess I'll find out.

There's a song called "What If It All Goes Right" by Melissa Lawson. It's becoming my own personal theme for the Team Dream 2009 ride:

What if it all goes right

What if it all works out

What if the stars line up

And good luck rains down

What if you chase your dreams

And it changes your whole life?

Yeah, what if it all goes right

What if you climb to the mountaintop and touch the sky

Grab a cloud as it passes by

You might fall, you might fall

But then again you might fly

What if it all goes right?

Part of trying to change the world is accepting the possibility that it might all Go Right. It's reaching up to grab the cloud, knowing that you could just as easily fly as fall, and knowing where you want to go when you fly.

Cheers.